Next electronic devices might go on or in you

Monday

Dec 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2013 at 6:32 AM

It's likely the world in the not-so-distant future will be increasingly populated by computerized people like Amal Graafstra. The 37-year-old doesn't need a key or password to get into his car, home or computer. He has programmed them to unlock at the mere wave of his hands, which are implanted with radio-frequency identification tags.

It’s likely the world in the not-so-distant future will be increasingly populated by computerized people like Amal Graafstra.

The 37-year-old doesn’t need a key or password to get into his car, home or computer.

He has programmed them to unlock at the mere wave of his hands, which are implanted with radio-frequency identification tags. The rice-size gadgets work so well, the Seattle resident said, that he has sold similar ones to more than 500 customers through his company Dangerous Things.

The move to outfit people with electronic devices that can be swallowed, implanted in their bodies or attached to their skin via “smart tattoos” could revolutionize health care and change the way people interact with devices and one another. Critics call the trend intrusive, even sacrilegious. But others say it ultimately will make life better for everybody. Some researchers and executives envision a day when devices placed in people will enable them to control computers, prosthetic devices and many other things solely with their thoughts.

“In the next 10 to 20 years, we will see rapid development in bioengineered and man-machine interfaces,” predicted Graafstra, who wrote a book about the technology. The trend is going to “ push the boundaries of what it means to be human,” he said.

Companies and researchers are keenly interested in the topic.

In a patent application made public in November, Google’s Motorola Mobility branch proposed an “ electronic skin tattoo” for the throat — with a built-in microphone, battery and wireless transceiver — that would let someone operate other devices via voice commands.

When asked, Google said it often seeks patents on employee brainstorms and that, while “some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t.”

Google CEO Larry Page apparently is intrigued with enhancing people electronically. A 2011 book about Google quoted Page as saying that “eventually you’ll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.”

Among the most widely anticipated uses for implants, smart pills and electronic tattoos are medical ones.

In October, Stanford doctors implanted the brain of a Parkinson’s disease sufferer with a new device that gathers detailed data on the “neural signatures” of his illness. They hope to use the information to make a gadget that will ease Parkinson’s symptoms with electrical impulses that adjust to any activity the patients do.

Last year, Proteus Digital Health won approval to sell a pill that relays information about a person’s vital signs via a mobile phone to his or her doctor. And executives at Intel envision their microchips one day in devices ingested or implanted for medical and other uses.

Some fear that implants might become mandatory for health insurance or jobs.

After learning about a Cincinnati video-surveillance firm that required employees to have a chip inserted in them, a state legislator in California introduced a bill that became law in 2008 forbidding anyone in his state from making similar demands.

Two years later, when the Virginia House of Delegates passed a similar measure, some of the legislators — citing biblical references about the Antichrist — denounced implanted chips as “the mark of the beast.”

It’s unclear how widespread those concerns are. A study that Intel made public this month found that 70 percent of the 12,000 adults it surveyed were receptive to having their health data collected by various means, including “swallowed monitors.”

One tattoo being developed by MC10 of Cambridge, Mass., would temporarily attach to the skin like an adhesive bandage and wirelessly transmit the wearer’s vital signs to a phone or other device. The company, which has a contract for a military version, plans to introduce one next year for consumers, according to MC10 official Barry Ives Jr. who touted its use for “athletes, expectant and new moms, and the elderly.”

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